The Resurgence of the New York City Hotel-Bar Scene

On a recent Friday night in New York City, just north of Madison Square Park, the Ace hotel’s dimly lit lobby was buzzing. In one corner, beneath a gigantic vintage American flag hanging from the lofty ceiling, a group of glossy-magazine editors sat around a large rectangular table having a boisterous conversation. Meanwhile, a waitress with a tray of drinks squeezed past the bar to serve the well-heeled guests lounging on red geometrically arranged couches in the Great-Northwest-meets-Williamsburg-enhanced foyer.

Around one a.m. the space cleared out. The social scene-sters were headed farther downtown. Some were probably venturing to the decadent penthouse bar at the Meatpacking District’s Standard Hotel, which Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, and Jude Law christened at a bash in mid-September. Others were likely going to swing by the cavernous lobby bar at the West Village’s Jane Hotel—the kind of place where, late on a Monday night in August, Phantom Planet front man Alex Greenwald surprised the rowdy revelers by stepping up to the mic to sing with a cover band. And chances are that a handful of the partygoers would end the night at the Gramercy Park Hotel’s Rose Bar, where they would sip cocktails by a fireplace surrounded by Warhols, Basquiats, and Schnabels.

Since when did New Yorkers start hotel hopping instead of bar hopping?

“There does seem to be a hotel-bar resurgence lately,” says Nur Khan, who operates the Rose Bar. Alex Calderwood, the creative force behind the Ace hotel, agrees: “There is a bit of a trend that is happening.”

The penthouse bar at the Standard hotel, in the Meatpacking District. From PatrickMcMullan.com.

New York City has a long and storied tradition of hotel bars, from Bemelmans Bar, at the Carlyle, to the King Cole Bar, at the St. Regis. “It was very glamorous way back in the day to hang out at the Waldorf or the Plaza,” says Jason Pomeranc, the co-founder of Thompson Hotels. But over the last few years, the city has seen a crop of new or renovated boutique hotels pop up—the Gramercy Park, Thompson L.E.S., Bowery, Jane, Cooper Square, Ace, Standard, Crosby Street, and Empire, among them—and the properties’ of-the-moment bars and roof decks have become the playground for the city’s fashionable crowd.

“Hotel lobbies are the most comfortable places to waste time in,” says man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia, the House of Waris jewelry designer who threw a wild party at the Jane during Fashion Week to celebrate the arrival of his accessories line at Barneys. Hundreds of people waited outside at three a.m. to get in. “With rooms upstairs, you don’t have to take your new friend too far,” he says.

But what started the recent hotel-bar revival? Did it happen when the Lexington Avenue W’s Whiskey Blue opened in 1998? When SoHo’s 60 Thompson debuted its A60 roof-deck membership in 2001? When its neighboring André Balazs–owned Mercer Hotel had celebrity-packed parties in early 2002? Or when the Meatpacking District’s Maritime hotel complex made a splash in 2003? It’s hard to say, but a lot of credit certainly belongs to the Rose Bar, which opened within Ian Schrager’s revamped Gramercy Park Hotel, in 2006. Schrager, who pretty much invented the concept of the V.I.P. room when he co-founded Studio 54 in 1977, hired Nur Khan to run the hotel’s night spot.

The Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. From PatrickMcMullan.com.

When the Rose Bar made its debut, the city was saturated with bottle-service clubs that played commercial hip-hop and aggressively promoted their celebrity clientele. “We [the Rose Bar] were a haven for V.I.P.’s that weren’t comfortable in that kind of an atmosphere,” says Khan, who has a long track record of operating more intimate spaces. “My guests know that I will always do my absolute best to protect them. The hotel, of course, benefits, but not at the expense of patrons in the bar.”

The Rose Bar made a policy not to tattle about what happened inside—and even went so far as to ban certain celebrities (including Paris Hilton) before it opened. And although Khan’s crew anticipated that the lounge would quickly become a hot spot, they didn’t want to disrupt the quiet Gramercy Park neighborhood by rolling out a venue where throngs of people would wait outside wanting to get in. “We couldn’t land in there like some spaceship, with people making tons of noise and going nuts,” says nightlife guru Nathan Ellis, the founder and president of Syndicate PR, who introduced Schrager to Khan. Ellis not only helped open the Rose Bar but also went on to assist with the launches of the Cooper Square, Ace, and Thompson L.E.S. hotels.

Having a hotel attached to the Rose Bar worked well for Khan, giving him a place to put up his celebrity friends from London, Paris, L.A., and elsewhere when they were in town for special events in the city, such as Fashion Week. “Of course, they would come to Rose Bar and hang out,” says Khan, reminding this author of the night she spent at the Gramercy Park roof top before the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famed Costume Institute Gala and spotted actor Josh Hartnett talking to music-industry insider Quincy Jones, actor Orlando Bloom dancing with Australian model Miranda Kerr, and Brazilian goddess Gisele Bündchen parading around with football stud Tom Brady. “In that way it becomes a real international hub for who is in town,” Khan says, “and the hotel’s profile and profitability are lifted.”

The approach was a hit. “That success in turn got a lot of attention,” Ellis says, “and naturally other operators and developers are going to be into that.”

But that’s not to say that Rose Bar invented the wheel.

The bar at the Bowery hotel, in the East Village.

“These hotel bars and lobbies have been popular for a quite a while,” says Sean MacPherson, who along with business partner Eric Goode, is behind the Maritime, Bowery, and Jane hotels, among other properties. (MacPherson and Goode are also Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s partners in the Waverly Inn.) But in the past, unlike today, every new hotel-bar opening seemed to be monumental. Take, for example, when Rande Gerber, whom some consider to be the godfather of the modern-day hotel bar, opened Whiskey Bar in Schrager’s Paramount Hotel, in 1991. At the time, New Yorkers didn’t generally have a choice between Irish pubs or dance clubs—the lounge concept didn’t really exist yet.

“I decided to open a small lounge at the hotel, kind of similar to the way I entertained at home, which was to sit around on comfortable couches and chairs by candlelight, play some good music, and have friends over for a good conversation,” Gerber says. “Hotels didn’t really lease out spaces, but the owners of the Paramount had the space available, and I signed a lease. Originally they thought it was a little crazy, like, ‘Who’s going to want to sit on couches?’”

On the one hand, Gerber thought he was taking a chance by creating something new; on the other hand, he figured if it didn’t work, he was putting his own money into the venture, and at least he’d have a cool place to hang out with his friends.

“Fortunately, it worked,” he says. “It took off pretty fast. On the third or fourth day, we had a few hundred people there, and it only held 100. There was a big line out the door. There wasn’t a whole lot to it—I did have Philippe Starck design it, so that was definitely a help and big benefit.”

Gerber went on to open other influential Schrager hotel bars in the 1990s, including the Morgans bar in New York City’s Morgans Hotel, along with Skybar bar in Los Angeles’s Mondrian Hotel. (Gerber’s namesake company now manages about 30 bars in hotels, including the Lexington Avenue W’s Whiskey Blue, in New York City.)

The rooftop bar at 60 Thompson, in SoHo.

The Paramount’s Whiskey Bar phenomenon—creating a popular local watering hole within a hotel—is something that today’s New York City hoteliers, such as the Thompson’s Jason Pomeranc, seek to emulate.

“Some of the seminal places that opened up, maybe originally with the Whiskey Bar, in New York; and then the Skybar at Mondrian, in L.A.; and the Met Bar, in London; and the roof at 60 Thompson, in New York—these started the psychology that hotels are not only end destinations for travelers, but they are also places for locals to make their end destinations,” Pomeranc says, echoing Alex Calderwood’s claim that the Ace’s lobby feels like the living room for the neighborhood.

One New Yorker who likes to use hotel spaces as an end destination for the social set is Andrew Saffir, whose Cinema Society film premieres and after-parties are coveted invites. Saffir was the first person to throw parties at the Gramercy Park roof top, the Standard’s beer garden, and the Crosby Street, Cooper Square, and Thompson L.E.S. hotels. “And all remain to this day incredibly chic, hip, and fun locales,” he says. “New Yorkers take great pride in being the first on the block to discover a new hangout.”

Lobby bars also tend to be slightly more refined. “And they feel safer in every way,” says Sean MacPherson, who pointed out that during the New York City blackout, in 2003, a group of people gathered at his Maritime Hotel because of its sense of security. “And lobby bars don’t have beer on draft and TVs and all that awful stuff. There is possibly greater civility in a hotel bar than, say, a dive bar on the Lower East Side.”

The lobby bar at the Jane hotel, in the West Village. From PatrickMcMullan.com.

But perhaps what Gerber tapped into back in the 1990s was something so obvious that today’s hoteliers can’t ignore it: hot hotel bars make good business sense. They can drive up what you charge for your rooms; generate free publicity and visibility beyond the initial opening; and create a market for millions of dollars’ worth of private-event bookings.

“I think that nightlife goes into the planning stages of the hotels now rather than that naturally happening,” says Jason Pomeranc. As Klaus Ortlieb, who just opened the Cooper Square Hotel, points out: “New hotels are integrating the bar business into their plans.”

After all, hoteliers have to differentiate their products—properties need a reason to be relevant and guests need an incentive to check in. But is this hotel-bar craze a trend, just like all of those other New York City nightlife iterations we’ve seen: the discos, the mega-clubs, the lounges, and the speakeasies that were running rampant before hotel bars came on the scene?

The outside of the Ace hotel. Photograph by Douglas Lyle Thompson.

“The idea of the hotel bar is here to stay in,” says Pomeranc. “I just think it’s important that it doesn’t become formulaic.”

Sean MacPherson agrees. “I see it as not a passing trend but a lasting staple,” he says.

There is something about the hotel-bar scene that harkens back to an era of bygone, sophisticated New York, and that’s something that a stand-alone bar or club can’t really provide. “A freestanding night club?” Syndicate PR’s Nathan Ellis says. “It’s difficult to give it the legs, the lifespan. I mean, have you ever been to a nightclub during the day?”

Or, as Saffir says, “More so than a restaurant or nightclub, a hotel exudes a very palpable glamour—five-star décor by designers of choice, very carefully curated crowds. And perhaps, for some, the proximity of hotel bars and restaurants to the meticulously designed chambers on the floors above adds a potent sense of intrigue—does the possibility of a late-night tryst with a transient stranger await?”